Police seeking suspects in car shootings

WESTBROOK – Police are looking for suspects who fired .25-caliber bullets into at least two moving vehicles on a busy street earlier this month.

Westbrook Police Chief Steven Roberts said in one shooting, a bullet dented the driver’s door and could easily have killed the 61-year-old woman who was driving. In a second incident, shots were fired into the front grill of a car driven by a 21-year-old University of Southern Maine student.

“In each case innocent people could have been killed by these reckless acts,” Roberts said.

The shootings happened on William Clarke Drive just before 10 p.m. Sept. 6.

Jean Winslow of Windham and her friend Connie Hemingway of Gorham had spent the evening at the Eagles Club in Westbrook and were headed back to Gorham in Hemingway’s Chevrolet Lumina.

As they were driving, Winslow said she heard six shots in quick succession, followed by a thump on the driver’s side door. She didn’t want to slow down in traffic but pulled over a few minutes later and found a quarter-inch round dent in the door, about 12 inches below the window.

“I never thought it was a bullet,” she said. “I’ve never been shot at before.”

At about the same time, Sarah Harris was headed to Gorham, where she is a student at USM. She recalled hearing three or four pops and thinking they were another car backfiring, police said.

Roberts believes the shootings were random and did not target the people involved.